Clash of Iron (The Iron Age Trilogy) Read online

  “The pirates returned to their base – some well-hidden cove – and demanded twenty talents for Caesar’s freedom. Young Julius told them that he was worth fifty and sent some of the crew from his ship to collect that sum. For the next few weeks he stayed with the pirates, not as a moping captive, but living as one as them. He joined with their sports and their carousing. He read them passages that he’d written. He insisted that they were quiet when he wanted to sleep. He began to teach some of them how to read.

  “All the time, he told them that after he was ransomed he’d return and crucify the lot of them. They must have thought he was joking.”

  “He wasn’t?” Ragnall asked. The rest of the party had disappeared for him, enveloped as he was in Cicero’s tale. He pictured a young man standing on a hot shore, making impertinent demands from fierce cutthroats. Could he really have been that confident and capable, or was he a brilliant blagger who’d spent every moment in captivity terrified for his life?

  Cicero continued. “He was not joking. The ransom arrived – fifty talents – and Caesar was freed. He sailed to the city of Miletus, and, with no authority beyond his own boldness, with no funds other than promises, in a foreign city miles from home, he raised a small army and commandeered four ships.

  “He returned to the pirates’ base and, using his knowledge of their habits and defences, captured them all with no casualties on either side. He sailed the pirates in shackles to Asia and handed them over to the Roman governor there. The governor dithered, which didn’t suit Caesar at all, so he carried out his own justice, as promised.”

  “He crucified them?”

  Cicero’s eyes widened. “Do you know what it is to be crucified?”

  “Is it painful?” answered Ragnall.

  “It is the most unbearable torture, which we see all too often in the Roman world.” Cicero shuddered as if at a bad memory, then gathered himself. “So what would Caesar do? He’d given his word that he’d crucify them, and a Roman keeps his word. However, these were men who, Caesar knew, had been led to a world of piracy by the policies of Rome, and, moreover, had treated him well and become his friends.”

  “A tricky one,” said Drustan.

  “What did he do?” asked Ragnall, grabbing a cup of wine from a passing slave.

  “He had all of their throats slit, then he crucified their corpses.”

  “A man of honour and clemency,” said Drustan.

  “Indeed. Now, let’s compare that with Clodius’ tale.” Cicero grinned a surprisingly naughty grin for such an eminent statesman. “This is not such a noble saga. Perhaps five years after Caesar’s brush with pirates, Clodius was on his way home from a war in the east, one in which he’d ignominiously stirred up trouble in the ranks, because he didn’t think the general, Licinius Lucullus, was pillaging his conquests sufficiently.”

  “Fish-tank Lucullus?” asked Ragnall.

  “The same. Having betrayed Lucullus, Clodius was captured by pirates on the way home. As we’ve seen, it was embarrassingly common at the time. Clodius said that the king of Egypt was his friend and would pay up without quibble, and his captors demanded the standard twenty talents.

  “The Egyptian king, a very rich man, did indeed know Clodius. He sent back a messenger with two talents and a letter saying that Clodius was worth only one talent, but he was feeling generous.”

  Drustan chuckled.

  “How did he get away?” asked Ragnall.

  “His nickname ‘the Beautiful’ is less fitting now than it was. He is still a fine-looking man, but he was an exquisitely attractive youth. He claims that he persuaded the pirates to free him with his fine oratory. Everybody else says the price for his freedom was his virginity, shared by all the pirates. Having heard him speak, I suspect that everyone else’s story is the more likely one.”

  “The pirates were women?” It didn’t seem a bad deal to Ragnall.

  “None of them were women.” Cicero raised an eyebrow.

  “…Ah…” said Ragnall.

  “So while Caesar’s escape is a tale of honour and bravery, Clodius paid for his release, with, if you’ll pardon the expression, his arse.” Cicero chuckled.

  “I keep hearing about … love between two men,” said Ragnall. “In Britain, if two men want to make love, that’s their lookout and not really anybody else’s. Here it seems to be a form of punishment?”

  “No, no, it isn’t normally. I believe that there’s nothing wrong with consenting adults doing whatever they want to each other. Most educated Romans share that view, but the official line and the average pleb do not. Moreover, homosexuality is illegal in the army, exactly where perhaps it shouldn’t be, given the lack of women. Of course it happens in the army and it is mostly ignored. In town, it’s tolerated but one is expected to carry it out with decorum. If you’re discovered, you won’t be beaten or ostracised, though. Roman citizens are more homo-amused than homo-phobic, so you might be teased, possibly to an unpleasant degree, but no more. There’s a story, in fact, about Caesar, when he was about your age, Ragnall, and his long stay at the palace of Nicomedes, the king of Bithynia. People still call Caesar the queen of Bithynia sometimes, behind his back. If you’d like to find out what crucifixion feels like, then try calling him the queen of Bithynia to his face. Ah! And talking of the man…”

  Ragnall followed Cicero’s gaze.

  Above the throng in the garden, walking slowly from the shade of a veranda to the cheers and applause of the partygoers, was Julius Caesar.

  For a Roman, Caesar was tall, perhaps a hand-span shorter than Ragnall. Facially, he looked a decade older than his forty years, but he had the figure of an energetic thirty-year-old. His leanly muscled, hairless calves led into a baggy, loose-belted, long-sleeved toga. Dark but sparkling eyes shone from a strong, large-featured face crowned with a wreath of oak leaves. Under the wreath, Ragnall could see that he’d combed greying hair forward to disguise a receding hairline. Despite all the affectation in his appearance, the man was immediately and potently striking. Ragnall had recently heard the expression that some men filled up a room with their presence. Caesar filled the outdoors. All conversation ceased and all eyes turned towards him. Ragnall felt himself staring, open-mouthed, but he couldn’t drag his attention away.

  Finally, Drustan broke the spell with a fear-filled whisper. “Turn round, keep your head down. We have to go. Now.” Ragnall had never heard the old druid so perturbed. He turned, full of concern, and saw dread in the old man’s eyes. He followed his gaze.

  There at Caesar’s side, smiling at the throng, was King Zadar’s chief druid, scourge of Britain and the man who’d killed Anwen, Ragnall’s fiancée. There, next to Rome’s man of the moment, was Felix.

  Chapter 2

  Spring rode down the track to Dug’s farm, her pony’s hooves clopping loud in the still evening. She saw he’d built – or, more accurately, hired labourers to build – yet another little building since she’d last been half a moon ago. She guessed it was the chicken house he’d been planning.

  Dug had once told her that exchanging coins for goods and services was a silly Romanisation. Things that you exchanged for other things should be useful, he’d argued, and coins weren’t. However, now that he had a lot of coins, he’d had a dramatic reversal of opinion. He’d exchanged a vast amount of coins in the last few moons, mostly for building materials and labourers’ time. The track had been converted from a muddy rut into a well-drained road, hemmed in by regular wooden fences. On her left, four shaggy ponies trotted towards her across the field that ran down to the cliff edge. On the right, a smattering of scrubby-coated brown sheep had noticed her as she’d crested the hill, but had apparently found her uninteresting and returned to their grazing.

  Six moons before, the farmhouse itself had been a small, smelly, tumbledown hut. Now it was a large, tidily made home, comprised of four mud and straw roundhouses joined by three wooden halls, all topped with a thick thatch to keep it cool in the heat and warm in the cold.
This main building enclosed three sides of a square, stone-flagged courtyard with a well, a cook fire and a new potter’s wheel which had never been used and, Spring reckoned, probably never would be now that Dug had discovered that you could exchange coins for pots. At the nearer end was Spring’s room, hers the whole time, even though she usually lived with Lowa on Maidun Castle. It was big, taking up all of one of the roundhouses, with two shuttered windows, one looking out to sea and one over the courtyard.

  Arranged neatly behind the house was a clutch of outbuildings. As well as the new chicken house, there was a grain shed on stilts, stables, a sty, pens and a strange, empty conical building that Dug’s farmworkers had built one day when they’d run out of useful work but Dug had wanted to get his coins’ worth out of them.

  The farm buildings rested on the side of a shallow, dry valley, which stretched two hundred paces from the house before being brought to an abrupt, grass-fringed stop at the top of the sea cliff. A hundred paces from the rest of the farm was the long cluster of mini huts that contained Dug’s bee colony. It was the part of Dug’s new farm that he was least happy with. He liked honey, but some unscrupulous man from a tribe of bee worshippers not far to the north had persuaded him that he needed many more bees than he actually did. He was thinking of getting rid of them, because the dogs kept getting stung. Those dogs …

  As if they knew she was thinking about them, Pig Fucker and Sadist’s broad faces poked up from behind a large trough, ears aloft. They saw it was Spring, woofed happy hellos, lolloped up the road and looped round to trot either side of her for the final few paces. They were huge, almost as big as her little horse, and identical apart from their colour. Pig Fucker was a sleek black Sadist and was the colour of a tawny owl.

  The dogs were another big change. When Dug had inherited them from Tadman they’d been chained monsters, snarling and snapping, absolutely furious with the world. They were still monsters, but the worst they’d ever do to Spring was slobber on her face, which she hated. Dug didn’t seem to mind when they licked him with their big gooey tongues, which was disgusting, especially considering his beard. What’s more, Sadist and Pig Fucker were not nice names and they no longer suited them – Dug had a boar and four sows, for example, and Pig Fucker hadn’t been near them for ages – but Dug had insisted that you couldn’t change a name. She’d pointed out that she did it the whole time – her real name was Sabina and he was happy to call her Spring, for the love of Toutatis – but he’d been adamant. Sadist and Pig Fucker they remained. So Spring called them Sadie and Pigsy, unless they were naughty.

  She dismounted by the stable, tied her pony to a rail, stroked the dogs for a few heartbeats while avoiding their mouth foam and corded dribbles of saliva, then headed round to the courtyard, wondering why Dug hadn’t walked out to greet her as usual. It worried her a little. She’d had a recurring nightmare recently of Dug floating underwater, dead. She told herself not to be silly, and the stomach rumble-inducing smell of chicken cooking over a fire did make it seem unlikely that anything could be wrong. Probably he was at a crucial stage of cooking and couldn’t leave the chickens unattended.

  The first thing she saw in the courtyard was a man who wasn’t Dug, leaning against the well. He was in his early twenties perhaps, clad in tight black trousers, a black smock and a black hat. He had a heavy iron blade at his waist, a pinched face, trimmed, dark facial hair and eyes like a weasel’s, one of which was surrounded by a fresh and nasty looking ring of bruise. His whole bearing screamed that he was up to no good. She started, then relaxed when she saw that his hands were tied behind his back.

  “Hello?” she said. He scowled back.

  “Welcome!” Dug stopped turning the spit that held two delicious smelling chickens over the cook fire, and stood up from his chair. “Caught this fellow after my chickens.”

  “I was just looking at them,” whined the man.

  “You don’t need to put them in a bag to look at them. We talked about that,” said Dug.

  The man darted his little eyes from Dug to Spring.

  “So,” continued Dug, “I’m going to set the dogs on him. I thought you’d want to see that, so I waited. They’re hungry and there’s nothing they like to eat more than chicken rustler. They raised the alarm so it’s only fair that they should eat him.”

  “Thanks! That’s kind of you all to wait. I’d love to see the dogs eat a criminal.” Spring smiled at the man.

  “Good, now first…” He spiked one of the cooking chickens with a pronged iron pole and sliced the breast from it, then picked up a black sack, which Spring took to be the robber’s, put the chicken breast into it and walked up to his captive, who recoiled. Dug told him to stay still, pulled open the hem of his tight black trousers and stuffed the bag down the front.

  “Pig Fucker, Sadist, come here,” he called. They rushed to his side. Their shoulders were higher than Dug’s waist. Spring was pretty sure they’d grown since she’d last seen them, and they’d been stupidly massive then. Dug pointed at the man. “Prepare to hunt!”

  The dogs flattened themselves to the ground and bubbled out low growls that made Spring tingle all over, not in a good way. Dug winked at her. This was a new trick. Spring was not sure that she approved.

  The thief squeaked unhappily and strained his bound wrists, which held firm behind him. Dug was good at knots.

  “Off you go,” said Dug.

  “What?” said the thief.

  “I’m letting you go. Don’t worry, you won’t be alone. The dogs love a chase almost as much as they love the taste of people who try to steal from me. So you’ve got twenty heartbeats.”

  “No, you can’t! Wait! I’ve got gold! I can give—”

  “Nineteen. Eighteen…”

  The thief took off at a sprint. With his hands tied behind his back, he didn’t look too different from the chickens he’d come to steal. When he’d gone round the corner, Spring let out the laugh she’d been holding in.

  “Two, one, go!” Dug finished his count, Spring put her fingers in her ears. The dogs barked as loudly as she’d expected them to, then hared off after their quarry.

  “Good, huh?” he said to Spring. “Did you see how they lay down and got menacing when I told them to? They really are becoming very good dogs.”

  “The man, they won’t…?”

  “Oh, they won’t hurt him, not at all. I can’t say the same for his trousers though, because they’re going to get that chicken.” Dug’s big shoulders rocked with one of his rare, genuine chuckles and Spring laughed along with him.

  They heard happy barking and a man’s scream from the road, and laughed all the more.

  Chapter 3

  Ragnall stared. It couldn’t be. How could Felix be sharing Caesar’s birthday entry?

  Drustan pulled at his sleeve, but Ragnall couldn’t turn. Felix’s eyes found his, looked from him to Drustan and flashed with joyous recognition. Keeping his eyes on them, he turned to whisper something to Caesar.

  “Come on!” Drustan said.

  Pupil and tutor pushed through the smiling, clapping crowd. They were met with tuts, jostles and a few muttered comments along the lines of “fucking barbarians” and “find some manners, plebs”.

  Finally they emerged from the tighter throng, and weaved their way through the looser groups of guests to a door that Ragnall thought must surely lead from the garden to the street. Wherever it went, it was away from Felix. That was the important thing.

  Ragnall grabbed the iron handle, twisted it and pushed. Nothing happened. He shook it. The door was locked.

  “We’re not the men you’re looking for,” Drustan said behind him.

  Ragnall spun.

  Four burly men had surrounded them. They were wearing the togas of partygoers but holding short, waisted legionaries’ swords. They were looking confused.

  “Oh, sorry,” said one, “I was sure we was meant to be after you.”

  “No, not us,” Drustan replied, “and you will help us op
en this door.”

  “Yeah, sure.” The man took a step forward.

  “Stop!” Felix’s voice. The man stopped moving as if suddenly frozen. Partygoers parted and Caesar walked towards them, flanked by Felix.

  “Caesar,” said Felix, “these men are Gaulish agents, spying out weakness in Rome’s defences.”

  The crowd gasped. As Drustan had explained to Ragnall, the Gauls had once sacked Rome. It had been over three centuries before, but the Romans still hated and feared the Gauls.

  “We are not Gaulish,” said Drustan. We come from—!” Drustan stopped talking as he realised that he was speaking in the British tongue, not Latin.

  “We’re from—” he tried. It was British again.

  “He’s trying to say…” Ragnall realised that he was speaking British, too. He tried again, thinking Latin, Latin, Latin: “Apples, pears, dogs, cheese, one, two, three—” he said, all in British.

  Felix’s lip curled with satisfaction.

  “Does anyone know what they are saying? What are they after? Are there others Gauls here?” asked Caesar. His clipped accent was refined like Clodia’s but sharper. He sounded more inquisitive than aggressive, more like a fascinated druid than an aggrieved general.

  “They are druids. They are cursing you,” said Felix. The crowd gasped. Gaulish druids’ curses were the stuff of horror stories. One of the sailors on the way from Britain had told Ragnall about a rich Roman man who’d driven his chariot past a pregnant Gaulish witch collapsed in some desolate spot and ignored her cries for help. Her unborn child had died as a result. She cursed the man’s family, saying that the first-born son of every generation to come would be torn apart by dogs between his fifth and sixth birthday. No matter what precautions they took, for more than ten generations now, dogs had found that family’s eldest son.